Backdoor: Design Debate

Can architecture really be a means of social control?

Classic or regressive? The Florida community
of Seaside is an early but famous example of New Urbanism. It has
been celebrated for its coherent architectural patterns, but has
also been depicted as a creepy, controlled community in the
movie The Truman Show

Walkable neighborhoods, public transportation, vernacular
architecture … when Mississippi chose to rebuild its
Katrina-battered coast according to the maxims of New Urbanism,
many architects and planners rejoiced. But some also voiced fiery
protests. In The Washington Post, architect Eric Owen Moss called
it "right-wing developer-speak masquerading as populism." Marlon
Blackwell, an architect and professor at the University of
Arkansas, told The New York Times, "It uses historicism as a way to
validate a kind of moralistic take on architecture."

Annals of architecture. The criticism has roots in
the annals of architecture, explains Michael Sorkin, professor and
director of one graduate architecture program at the City
University of New York and owner of Michael Sorkin Studio. "I see
this as kind of a tributary of a much larger controversy," said
Sorkin. It begins with the early 20th-century Swiss-French
architect Le Corbusier, who envisioned high-rise residential
buildings as modern alternatives to the gritty tenement
neighborhoods of 19th-century cities. Le Corbusier also foresaw
spacious urban landscapes where people live and work in separate
locations, united by the then-new automobile. Decades later, urban
planners would come to deride crime-plagued housing projects and
scorn the suburbs as environmentally and socially ruinous. Critics
cried out for a return to historical forms, and Miami architect
Andrés Duany responded, offering his historic-leaning ideas
as an alternative to Modernism.

New Urbanists champion cities modeled after small towns of
yesteryear, where people live and work in close proximity and enjoy
a sense of community unavailable in alienating, auto-dependent
suburbs. But critics, especially in academia, view the movement's
historic emphasis as regressive. In his interview with the Post,
Moss characterized New Urbanism as appealing to an "anachronistic
Mississippi that yearns for the good old days of the Old South."
Moss reframed the issue for Coastal Contractor, suggesting New
Urbanism prettifies history. He compares it to a Hollywood version
of Charles Dickens' London, which might look "very intriguing to
you and me, as long as we weren't one of the characters who had to
live there."

Critics also contend that New Urbanism doesn't live up to its
environmentally friendly patina and community-conscious claims.
"Despite the rhetoric, what they have produced is essentially a
slightly different variation of a suburb," Sorkin said. In his
view, New Urbanist developments "tend to be gated communities for
upper-middle-class white folks."

Unflappable appeal. Still, none of these complaints
have dented New Urbanism's appeal. The movement has spawned an
entire generation of planned communities nationwide, including
Disney's Celebration in Orlando. It also inspired Mississippi
Governor Haley Barbour to bring Duany to Biloxi after Katrina
struck to organize a week of brainstorming sessions with dozens of
like-minded architects in the Congress of New Urbanism. Out of
these sessions came redevelopment plans for Mississippi's 11
coastal cities (see "Gulf Renaissance," Breakline, March/April
'06).

The speed of the state's embrace of New Urbanism stunned those who
had watched it from the sidelines, and the Republican Barbour's
support was just the ammunition they needed to link New Urbanism's
small-town emphasis with right-wing talking points about
traditional values.

Duany has called the attacks on New Urbanism's historicism
"ridiculous" and charges that late 20th-century coastal development
needs serious rethinking. "Just show me a building on the
Mississippi Gulf Coast that was Modernist that wasn't just vulgar
trash," he said. Prior to Katrina, he claims, Mississippi's coast
was deteriorating into unmitigated sprawl. After the hurricane, the
state has an unprecedented chance to rethink its entire coast, and
Duany feels New Urbanism is the only serious contender offering a
legitimate alternative. "People are for it or against it, but
that's what they're discussing," he notes. —
Aaron Hoover